The New Lost City Ramblers
is a contemporary old-time string band that formed in New York City
in 1958 during the Folk
Revival. The founding members of the Ramblers, or NLCR,
are
Mike Seeger,
John Cohen, and
Tom Paley.
Tom Paley
later left the group and was replaced by
Tracy Schwarz.
The New Lost City Ramblers not only directly participated in the
old-time music revival, but has
continued to directly influence countless musicians who have
followed. Indeed, except for
The
Kingston Trio, the NLCR may well be the longest-running popular
music group still performing, albeit irregularly.
The Ramblers distinguished themselves by focusing on the
traditional playing styles they heard on old
78rpm records of musicians recorded during the 1920s
and 1930s, many of whom had earlier appeared on the
Anthology of American Folk
Music. The NLCR refused to "sanitize" these southern sounds as
did other
folk groups of the time, such
as
the Weavers or Kingston Trio.
Instead, the Ramblers have always strived for an
authentic
sound. However, the Ramblers did not merely copy the old recordings
that inspired them. Rather, they would use the various
old-time styles they encountered while at the
same time not becoming slaves to imitation.
On "Songs From the Depression," the NLCR performed a variety of
political contemporary popular songs from the New Deal days, all
but one of them taken from commercially issued 78s, and that one is
"Keep Moving," identified in the album notes only as "from Tony
Schwartz' collection — singer unidentified" when actually it is by
Agnes "Sis" Cunningham, the full title being
"How Can You Keep On Moving (Unless You Migrate Too)." The omission
later caused
Ry Cooder, who listened to
the Ramblers album, to record the song as Traditional on the first
edition of his
Into the Purple
Valley album, an omission he gladly corrected when informed of
it. Cooder also covered another song from the same NLCR album,
which he may have heard on a poorly labeled cassette copy: "Taxes
on the Farmer Feeds Us All" which the NLCR credit to Fiddling John
Carson but which the Cooder notes still list as
"traditional."
The New
Lost City Ramblers' extensive recordings for the Folkways label, after the death of Moe Asch, became part of the Smithsonian
Institution
, which reissues Folkways titles on CD.
Discography
References
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